Critical Essay by John Gardner

"Sophie's Choice" is a courageous, in some ways masterly book, a book very hard to review for the simple reason that the plot—even the double entendre in the title—cannot be given away. Certain things can be said without too much harming the novel's considerable effect: The story treats two doomed lovers, Nathan Landau, a brilliant, tragically mad New York Jew, and Sophie Zawistowska, a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz, and their intellectual and emotional entrapment, for better or worse, of the novelist-narrator.

Thematically, the novel treats the familiar (which is not to say trivial) Styron subject, the nature of evil in the individual and in all of humanity. Brooding guilt is everywhere….

The novel's courage lies partly in this: After all the attacks on Styron, especially after "The Confessions of Nat Turner," which some blacks...